So much science education happens in informal ways--outside of the classroom. These experiences can be so valuable and sometimes even more influential than the classic approaches taken for so long by the public school system of the American culture.

You can think of it as the United Nations of knowledge - except no dictators wearing pistols are allowed to get up and spout nonsense.  Or you could think of it as the Wikipedia of knowledge, without letting marketing people and activists control what gets seen.

Europeans call it DRIVER and it already  has millions of documents.

The backbone of DRIVER is a technological breakthrough that enables institutions to link repositories of knowledge together into one huge, networked online ‘library of libraries’.   The software, called D-NET, can link information collected on diverse computer platforms, using legacy software which can still ‘talk’ or work with older systems.

I like Penn&Teller, the magicians and debunkers of pseudoscience and general inanity. I regularly use clips from their show in my critical reasoning class, despite cringing every time Penn indulges in his “fuck this” and “motherfucker that” exercise in free speech (it distracts the students from the real point, not to mention the always lurking possibility of an administrator asking me about the appropriateness of foul language in a philosophy class).

I'm torn.  There's two ways I would make a new smash video game, "Astronomy Hero".

In the first, you are doing night observing runs, trying to accumulate enough light from each target while evading clouds.  Different targets appear at different times of night, and you have to balance whether to finish a given target (accumulate enough photons) or switch to something that just appeared in hopes that you can do better there.  Targets of different brightness or dimness require different 'stare' times that you're focusing on them, so you're constantly trying to maximize total on-target time while making sure the more valuable targets get done.

If you want to solve big network security problems, sometimes it pays to think small - as in ants.

A concept called 'swarm intelligence' adapts quickly to changing threats and it uses 'digital ants' to wander through computer networks looking for those threats, such as computer 'worms', those  self-replicating programs designed to steal information or facilitate unauthorized use of machines. When a digital ant detects a threat, it doesn't take long for an entire army of ants to converge at that location, which also draws the attention of human operators who step in to investigate.

You may feel like you're not in the same league as Albert Einstein or Charles Darwin (note: statistically, you are not)  but you probably share one thing if you are reading this article; patterns of correspondence.

A new Northwestern University study of human behavior says that people who wrote letters in olden days using pen and paper did so in a pattern similar to the way people use e-mail today.  The study in Science seeks to find the similarity of these two seemingly different activities, with the underlying pattern of human activity linking letters and e-mails.

Very sound advice from systems biologist Uri Alon:

A common mistake made in choosing problems is taking the first problem that comes to mind. Since a typical project takes years even it if seems doable in months, rapid choice leads to much frustration and bitterness in our profession. It takes time to find a good problem, and every week spent in choosing one can save months or years later on.

Well, it seems that someone has finally decided that with all this talk of "end-times" and the "rapture" it was important that we have a more scientific approach to determining how close we actually are to such events.

Hence we have the Rapture Index, which is billed as "The prophetic speedometer of end-time activity".  By going to this site, you can quickly see what the Rapture Index value is and determine whether to sit down with a cup of coffee and await the end, or whether you still need to go to work.

Do you really care about the human race ? I do, and probably I do more than you do. Well, not more than you, maybe -I do not know you personally!-; but I know where you come from: the class of human beings presently alive. And I think that most of the people on this planet just believe they care about mankind, but they actually care just about themselves.

A commenter on a previous post seems to have objected to the claim that evolutionary science makes predictions.

gimme 5 examples of predictions, i mean real predictions: not fit the model hogwash

Marilyn

Here's a list that I put together in around 10 minutes.

1) That a transitional fossil linking fishes and tetrapods would be found in rocks of a specific age (from the Devonian) and formed in freshwater environments. CONFIRMED.